After the relative ‘success’ of the Nigerian 401 schemes that promise you a large amount of money in return for ‘helping’ the authors of the email to secure large sums of money from secret bank accounts after the untimely death of the account owner, there have been even more ‘creative’ emails going around the Internet. Recently, though the net for such spam emails has gotten wider, as they have evolved past this scheme to include lotteries that you won but don’t remember entering, contracts, and now job arrangements, and even business partnerships.

Almost all of these spams look something like the one above. They usually are very toned down in their approach and have better English than the Nigerian scams; however, they are never addressed to individuals, and always promise big bucks, big orders, big jobs, or whatever. They are all the same, however; they are unsolicited, unwelcome and may cause you serious problems if you respond to any of them.

Most likely, these emails are soliciting your personal information under the guise of a job application form; but providing this information may just give you one big headache. Or, as in this case, they’ll be looking for you to provide a source of ‘transaction fees’ in order to receive payments (these payments will never come, but you will need to pony up more and more ‘processing fees’).

In the above case, a quick look at the spelling and mistakes will raise your concern; a little thinking will establish the flaw – a company should already be able to get funds from its customers (otherwise, how would it survive?); and the lack of official contact information should be the flashing red light – no phone number, no email address with their domain name (Yahoo address!) and no physical address!

The danger in these emails is that they look fairly plausible at first reading, so some individuals may be duped into making contact in the first place! Do not reply to these emails! You will only cause yourself more problems!